The reinstatement of UAB’s football program raises the question again about the outsize role of football at an academic institution. Why is the University of Chicago among the few schools that have ever successfully eliminated football, although even they reinstated it later (albeit at the Div. III level)?
So many people in academic (and now health) circles bemoan football’s primacy in American society and the destructive role it plays. Here’s a provocative (delusional really!) thought: The Ivy League is always held up as the Gold Standard for U.S. higher education, and it is the envy of much of the world. What would happen if it and its members took the daring stance to eliminate football too, the way Chicago did back in the 1950s, or even just drop from Div. I to Div. III? Would it really hurt its cachet? How many people think of “football” when they hear the phrase “Ivy League” today? To the vast majority it means “elite academics” not sports.
Are you kidding? Harvard has been nonstop crowing about its 10-0 season last year. Did you see the College Gameday show they did there last fall? Students in the background were holding up signs “We want Bama - for Chess.” I think the Hoover AL high school team could give the Crimson a drubbing.
Its not going to happen. The Ivy’s don’t want to follow the Swarthmore model.
The bottom line of football is this: If only true academic elites attended college, football wouldn’t matter. But colleges need great numbers of regular people, and so football does matter. The larger the school, the more it matters. (Actually, it would be interesting to know what is the largest main campus without a football team.)
A lot of people think that sort of stuff. Their top hs players come to the Ivy’s and end up sitting on the bench. 
(Assuming that you mean American football, not soccer, and colleges and universities in the US.)
It looks like 6 of the 9 University of California campuses do not have an intercollegiate football team, and 17 of the 23 California State University campuses do not have an intercollegiate football team. CSU Fullerton and CSU Northridge are probably the largest of these (about 38,000 students each) without intercollegiate football teams.
But New York University beats them with an enrollment of 53,000 students and no intercollegiate football team.
Then you have University of Phoenix, but it is hard to find campus enrollment. Although it has no football team, it has its name on a stadium.
Most 4 and 5 star recruits go to the big powerhouse programs in the SEC, Big10, Pac10, etc. Some may end up in the Ivys, but they’re not the top picks.
Well, certainly the Ivies of today (along with Stanford, Duke, et al.) could fill their ranks with “true academic elites” several times over. So why does it “matter” to them, @dadx ?
And, yes, @NovaDad09, I said the question was delusional, but I’m still curious!
But the Ivys could probably field very competitive cricket teams.
@LucieTheLakie, football (and some other DivI sports; notably hockey) matter to the alums of Ivy schools. @dadx’s point is that the Ivies don’t want to fill their schools with only true academic elites even if they could several times over.
Also, Carnegie Institute of Technology (before it merged to form CMU) also dropped high-level football.
Fordham was a big football power. Vince Lombardi was on that team (one of the famed “7 blocks of granite”).
So far as I’m aware, not that many people in the Ivy league really care very much about football, actually. Except Harvard and Yale care about the Harvard-Yale game,
But that’s really more about measuring their [whatever]s than it is about football. They could just as well be playing tiddlywinks.
People tend to come out of the woodwork and start caring a bit about their team when it seems to be particularly good, for whatever reason. “Fair-weather fans”, if you will, So while that’s going on they may care somewhat. But generally most people there don’t care much, overall.
Alumni do not really care much about football, overall, either (except for the Harvard -Yale game) . Because these schools were never good at football at any time that any of the alumi attended either.
The Ivy League could get rid of football, if there was some reason to do that.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean they want to get rid of it. Why should they? It’s another thing to do on campus, another option. A place to sit and hang out on a nice fall day. Cheer for your mediocre team and listen to the other school’s goofy excuse for a marching band insult your school at half time. A sometimes healthy diversion from non-stop studying in the libraries.
For the subset of schools that are into it, it would probably be more of a problem to get rid of hockey. (However the other few DID get rid of their hockey teams).
But the Ivy League offers lots of athletics programs, both varsity and intramurals, I think. They pride themselves on offering more extracurricular options for their students. Not fewer.
Football certainly does not have an outsized role at these schools, however.
I get all of that. That’s kind of my point. That even the most rarefied of schools like Harvard have no real motivation for changing the status quo regarding football. Even when one of their own alumni (http://www.bu.edu/bostonia/web/concussions/) is at the vanguard of the movement to change the way the game is played.
The Ivies are supposed to be the thought leaders and game-changers (pardon the pun), but even they (apparently) have too much to lose to consider eliminating the sport.
It’s like an arms race. Yale would have to give up their football program too simultaneously 
^^^I know. That’s why my initial proposal was for the Ivy League and not any individual member, but I could have been clearer about that!
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Then who will the MIT pranksters victimize?
Boston College???
@LucieTheLakie: “the Ivies are suppose to be blah-blah-blah”.
I’m sorry, but you’re attaching too much importance to an athletics conference.
@PurpleTitan, but they’re NOT just “an athletics conference.” They are a huge brand whose value I’ll leave some of you fancy-pants MBA types to put a price tag on.
Seriously, if the Ivy (athletic) League did nothing but change its name, can you imagine the impact? Or are you suggesting that applications to its member schools wouldn’t take a hit by such a change?
Maybe I’m wrong; perhaps no one would care. Should we try it? 
Check out the current entry for “Ivy League” on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League
The entry has 153 footnotes, by golly. Now that’s a BRAND!
.@LucieTheLakie, yes, they’ve done a great job branding, but the branding works only because lemmings (some would call them unsophisticated lemmings) are willing to attach those connotations on to an athletics conference.
BTW, Wikipedia entries are written by people, not God. I’m going to hazard a guess that the Ivy League entry is edited mostly by Ivy grads.
To illustrate the point, a British student on another thread was looking to transfer out of an unnamed Ivy because he didn’t feel the environment was intellectual/academically inspiring enough and he was shocked that his school was in the same grouping as some other Ivies, where he had friends at and which he thought were a clear level above.
Evidently he didn’t get the memo that just because a school plays football against some other schools doesn’t mean that they are similar (and that some schools outside that particular athletics conference may have more of what he’s looking for).